Gene Kelly would be 100 years old today.

Singing in the Rain by Freed and Brown has been incorporated in animation and even the dark movie A Clockwork Orange. But, the screen version with Gene Kelly should put a smile on your face and get your toes tapping and deserves a place in any library media collection. Enjoy ~

Favorite Handy Reference Book: People, Places, and Things

When patrons come to me at the reference desk, there’s one book I readily pull out to consult. It’s not a replacement for checking the catalog but it’s a helpful starting point for patrons looking for a particular topic. This handy reference book is titled People, Places, and Things, a reference book once published by OCLC.

People, Places, & Things is a reference tool listing popular LCSH headings in alphabetical order with corresponding Dewey call numbers. (I found a description of the book on page 4 in a 2003 newsletter by OCLC) Depending on the topic you’re looking up, there may be more than one Dewey number assigned to it.

The book doesn’t list every topic patrons ask at the desk but it’s still useful. Sometimes I have to think of another term for a subject if I can’t find it listed. If it’s still not there after looking it up, I’ll consult the catalog. At times the book been a back up for looking up call numbers when our catalog was offline.

We *do* need our education!

I discovered People, Places, & Things when I first started 5 years ago. It was one of several reference resources we kept on the History-Biography reference desk. (The copyright date is 2001 on the copy we have) Since then this book has been invaluable to me.

When I worked in our Popular Library Division on the first floor, I continued to use this reference resource because patrons frequently came to our reading room first. Patrons would tell me what subject area they needed; I’d look it up in the book and write down the Dewey number. With that in hand, they could locate what they needed in the other reading rooms. When I returned to non-fiction reference, People, Places, & Things came along too. It’s worked well for me and a great tool.

Virtualization of the Patron Experience

This very interesting article in USAToday about the future of retail and virtualization of the customer experience demonstrates how big data can affect and effect virtualized experiences for their patrons:

Libraries compete with online information resources in much the same way the traditional retailers compete with online sellers.

Question ~ How will libraries adapt over the next ten years?

Discussion ~My work in managing/developing online catalogs – with 20,000+ medical equipment / supply products and 7,000+ multi-website display products exceeded what library catalogs do and from an SEO standpoint would beat out Amazon for Google placement. Traditional retail could not compete because of delivery and cost. BestBuy is a great place to put your hands on tech, but the prices are much higher. As e-commerce websites become more and more user-friendly – where you have good photos of products and good descriptions, the whole process ends up making all products into commodities with the lowest cost determining purchase.

With libraries, the focus has generally been on maintaining the status quo and keeping current bureaucracies in place until they can retire. This is not any different for any other bureaucracy – it is a natural inclination – not library specific to simply maintain. With the focus on cost of maintaining services though, without innovation the perception of value diminishes. One of the best things I have seen recently in libraries is the introduction of Makerbots as a library resource. It is those sorts of high-priced shared resources that extend the value and bring people inside the library systems.

But, the issue does become lowest cost. As we see transportation cost rise, the casual trip to the library could cost $10 in gas. What would $10 purchase virtually? The associated costs of operating libraries – broken down between the people who continue to use them and the disproportionate number of people who don’t would add additional cost to each real visit. As information becomes a commodity the lowest cost will determine where we purchase. That does not mean that the value of libraries as a sense of place and source of inspiration does not add a real value to information consumption.

“I should have been regularly backing up my MacBook. I shouldn’t have daisy-chained two such vital accounts I shouldn’t have used the same e-mail prefix across multiple accounts I should have had a recovery address that’s only used for recovery without being tied to core services. I shouldn’t have used Find My Mac.” —

To me, this is the result of short-term profit maximization at the corporate level mixed with the path of least resistance at the user level. Companies can operate cheaper, more efficiently up to the point of the hack in the cloud and maximize profits. Users don’t have to do too much to enjoy the convenience of the cloud up to the point of the hack. Yet, with each successful hack, the knowledge of how to hack becomes known globally – greatly increasing risk to all users and all companies using the cloud.

Fortunately, OSL did step up their security a bit with pins, but it created inconvenience to the administrators and the users. One of the librarians who witnessed the events leading to the change told me that the battle for security over short-term convenience was ugly but she did not want to speak about it publicly. I can understand that – given the justifiable paranoia over having the circulation records used for identity theft and no one wanting to take responsibility. But, all it takes is just a bit of laziness at the top levels and bad policy to put everyone at risk. And, unfortunately, the first rule of Library Fight Club is not to talk about Library Fight Club so everyone does not know of the risk. Knowledge of risk is limited to insiders who may not know how to manage risk and insure accountability.

I think the real point of the Mat Honan article is that the writer was not dumb – he is most likely in the top 2% of people who understand technology. So, every ‘error’ he made – which would not be considered errors by the other 98% of us – is a risk.

The people working in libraries most likely represent the upper 30 or 40% of people who understand technology simply by being surrounded by books and publicly paid for technology. But, as gatekeepers to those resources they create the impression of expertise. Some are experts, but really most are not. Standing next to a pile of books does not mean you read them. Being able to turn on a computer does not mean you know how it works. Being responsible for information security does not mean that the information is secure.

What we can take from the Mat Honan article is the humility of the author in showing that he failed himself and should have known better. There are many, many people in administrative positions including libraries that are responsible for information security who would never admit that they know not what they do. There are many, many people in corporations that will never admit or may not even know that their systems have been or are compromised. All we can hope for is strong laws that mandate reporting and at least a few people such as the author of the Wired article to own up to what they do not know as an example for the other 98% of us.

It used to be that you would need to be able to configure Satan and really have a strong grasp of command line interfaces and operating systems to be a hacker. You really would need advanced knowledge and some fairly sophisticated resources to hack. Not any more.

Backtrack : http://www.backtrack-linux.org/ can be installed very easily and used by novice hackers with ill intent utilizing easy to follow step-by-step instructions on Youtube. Just using one of my high gain antennas with a little laptop, I can war drive or sit in my house and see many, many exploitable WIFI services locally with little or no protection. I could crack a WEP in about 2 minutes, but so many people now rarely even bother to protect their WIFI. They are just happy that it works out of the box. As an ethical hacker, I will never exploit those vulnerabilities. But, the time when exploitation was limited to those with wilful intent, advanced knowledge of computer systems along with strong social engineering skills has passed. We are now in an era where a hack can be easily accomplished with a bit of simple social engineering (SPOKEO anyone?), the intent and common access to a computer. In fact, with very little knowledge about computer systems it would be very easy to inadvertently exploit a system using Backtrack without intent.